Ice Cube & Bun B Talk In-Depth About The Age Issue In Hip-Hop

Hip-Hop legends Ice Cube and Bun B recently spoke to HipHopSince1987 about the issue of the rap game being a young man’s game.

Cube, 44, thinks it’s “crazy” to expect a rapper to retire at a young age. “I think any young man thinkin’ about, talkin’ about like they want to reture, and they not playing sports, then they crazy. What the fuck we gonna do? Go fishin’? This is what we do, and it is no shelf life for an emcee if he’s committed to his fans.”

Cube also admitted that pressure does exist for established emcees to “bow out gracefully.” Again, Cube doesn’t agree. “It can be frustrating, because it’s an ‘out with the old, in with the new’ mentality. But if you’re committed to your fans, and you’re happy with your spot, keep doing records, and you keep giving the people what they want to hear, and you’re happy with what you get out of it. We’ve all carved out a career out of this, it’s all gravy, so whatever we get out of the game, we should be happy with.”

At this point, Bun B chimed in to add his two cents. “You gotta remember that Hip Hop is one of the youngest art forms out there. Still a very young genre of music. Our fans are still in a certain age group, and they haven’t given up on us yet, so I see no reason why we should be giving up on them.”

“We just gettin’ to the point where our fans are fifty, sixty years old, but we still see artists out there giving them that music, man. They wanna come to the shows, they still wanna listen to the music that they appreciated in their younger years. They haven’t given up on life; they haven’t given up on enjoying themselves and partying, and we should still be there to facilitate that.”